"A whole new function," said Mr. Claxton, who may also have inspired the city's indigent homeless, walking by that night, to a new level of appropriation and design, too.
Whether that means going to a soup kitchen and feeding the homeless, walking around a track for this/that/the other cause, buying cookie dough to supports my nieces and nephews, or -- in the absence of time or money -- using words to spread the word about things that are worthy causes.
On Monday night, HBO offers the documentary short "Redemption," a delicate portrait of those bedraggled people, some of them homeless, who walk New York City streets collecting cans and bottles for the nickel deposit.
"They don't understand that I'd love to have a job, but it's kind of hard when you're homeless to walk into a place when you don't have an address or anything.
"I'm walking down the street and, literally, strangers would come up and say, 'Smile.' I remember clear as day walking down the street in Houston and this homeless guy walks up and he says: 'Life is not that bad.
Which is like the thoughts of a homeless man walking in an alien / city in freezing weather.
He may have been "a homeless person walking across the tracks or something like that," said Sgt. James Foley, a police spokesman.
That morning, she and her son Kereem, then 46, who at the time was homeless himself, walked by the center, called the East New York Clubhouse.
At one point, a homeless guy walked by with a cartful of bottles to redeem, and Mike knew him and said hello.
Before finding Cabrini, "we were homeless and walked the streets for months and slept in the waiting room of Cook County Hospital," said Ms. Ricks's daughter Tasha, 29, who is a union construction worker and owns a two-flat on the South Side where she lives with her children and a sister.
